Heterosexual puppet Nicky tries to help the sexually repressed puppet Rod come out of the closet. He sings, “If you were queer / I’d still be here / Year after year / Because You’re Dear To Me.”
A bit more devious (in a good way) is the song “Everyone’s A Little Bit Racist.” During this number, the characters proclaim that “everyone makes judgments based on race,” and that if we accepted this “sad but true” premise society could “live in harmony.”
The song’s argument might be specious, but the audience’s self-deprecating laughter throughout the musical number is very telling.
Everything in Life Is Only For Now Recently, “spiritual” books such as Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth have been asking readers to focus on the present, to embrace “The Power of Now.” (I wonder… Does this message anger historians?) In any case, this currently popular concept stems from ancient times. Buddhists have long since explained the impermanence of existence. Avenue Q follows the Buddhist path in its final song, “For Now.” These cheerful Avenue Q lyrics remind the audience that all things must pass:
“Each time you smile / It’ll only last a while.”
“Life may be scary / But it’s only temporary.”
In the end, despite its zaniness and crude jokes, Avenue Q delivers a sincere philosophy: We must appreciate the joys and endure the sadness we currently experience, and acknowledge that all is fleeting, a lesson that makes life seem all the more precious.
Why Puppets? Why use puppets to deliver the message? Robert Lopez explained in a New York Times interview, “There's something about our generation that resists actors bursting into song on the stage. But when puppets do it, we believe it.”
Whether it’s Punch and Judy, Kermit the Frog, the cast of Avenue Q, puppets make us laugh. And while we are laughing, we usually wind up learning at the same time. If a regular human were on stage singing a preachy song, many folks would probably ignore the message. But when a muppet talks, people listen.
The creators of Mystery Science Theater 3000 once explained that, “You can say things as a puppet that you can’t get away with as a human.” That was true for MST3K. It was true for the Muppets. It was true for the bombastically cruel Punch, and it is eloquently true for the ever-insightful show Avenue Q.
